html_forms: Forms and their controls

In zuhtml: Parse 'HTML' with a Bundled 'Gumbo' Parser

Forms and their controls

Description

Describes each ⁠<form>⁠ below the given nodes (and the nodes themselves) and the controls it owns, for inspection. Nothing is submitted, fetched or built into a request.

Usage

html_forms(x)

Arguments

x	A zuhtml_document or zuhtml_nodeset.

Details

A control belongs to a form as the HTML standard's form owner says: the form named by its form attribute (the element with that ID, if it is a ⁠<form>⁠; no form otherwise), else its nearest ancestor ⁠<form>⁠. Old pages often write ⁠<table><form><tr><td><input ...>⁠, where the parser closes the form at once but browsers still associate the following controls with it; such a form, left empty inside a table, owns the controls without another owner that follow it in that table, up to the next form.

Controls are ⁠<input>⁠, ⁠<select>⁠, ⁠<textarea>⁠ and ⁠<button>⁠ elements, in document order. Values follow the DOM:

• type is an input's type (lowercased; "text" when missing or unknown), "select-one" or "select-multiple", "textarea", or a button's type ("submit" by default);

• value is the value attribute ("on" for a checkbox or radio button without one, else ""); a textarea's text; or a select's first selected option's value, where a single select with no option marked selected selects its first enabled option;

• disabled is TRUE for a control with a disabled attribute or inside a disabled ⁠<fieldset>⁠ (except in its first ⁠<legend>⁠).

Value

A list with one element per form, in document order, each a list of:

• action: the action attribute resolved as html_url() resolves URLs; without one, the document's base URL, as browsers submit to the page itself; NA when neither resolves;

• method: "get", "post" or "dialog" ("get" when missing or invalid);

• enctype: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" (the default), "multipart/form-data" or "text/plain";

• id, name: the attributes, or NA;

• fields: a data frame with one row per control and columns name (NA when absent; repeated names are kept), type, value, checked (TRUE/FALSE for checkboxes and radio buttons, NA otherwise), disabled, and options, a list-column holding for each select a data frame of its options (value, label, selected, disabled) and NULL for other controls.

See Also

Other extraction: html_links(), html_list(), html_table(), html_table_cells(), html_url()

Examples

doc <- html_parse(paste0(
  "<form action='/search' method=POST>",
  "<input name=q value='zuhtml'>",
  "<select name=sort><option>relevance<option selected>date</select>",
  "<label><input type=checkbox name=exact checked> Exact</label>",
  "<button>Search</button></form>",
  "<input form=search-options name=page value=2>",
  "<form id=search-options></form>"
), base_url = "https://example.org/")
forms <- html_forms(doc)
forms[[1]][c("action", "method")]
forms[[1]]$fields[, c("name", "type", "value", "checked")]
forms[[1]]$fields$options[[2]]
forms[[2]]$fields$name

zuhtml documentation built on Oct. 6, 2026, 5:06 p.m.